Thursday, February 10, 2011

And the shopping begins

In my last post I mentioned that I'd be starting to look for new corporate opportunities and that I would most likely move in-game after moving in real life. So in between packing the little I have to pack I will be spending a bit of my game time perusing the recruitment forum threads on the EVE-O forums, convo-ing some people that I know well and some that I know less or not at all. Already a small shopping list is forming and various eve-mails will have to be sent and some channels will have to be joined.

I had also mentioned that I would be flying with some blues of ours, and as I was killing some EoM fanatics yet again somebody piped up in their channel like a bad man offering a kid some candy: "Hey Coz, want some pew-pew?" Of course I want some! I killed the last Death Lord, said "to hell with salvaging", docked up, turned in the mission, and clone-jumped to PvP HQ to grab a Hurricane. The promised pew-pew consisted of a smallish camp on a Hi-sec/Low-sec gate in the Black Rise region, my first time flying around there. The first scout report called for 1 Raven, 2 Drakes and 1 Harbinger, with a probable Falcon. We had 1 Maelstrom, 1 Dominix, 3 Hurricanes, 1 Drake, and one other ship I can't remember. Yep, this sounded like it was going to be fun. A third Drake and a Sacrilege joined the enemy side and it really wasn't clear if the Falcon was going to be there. But our enemies weren't just camping; sometimes they would fly off and one ship would come back, the gang would return, etc. So we sent in one of our guys when there was only one Drake on the gate. After a bit of waiting to see if he would aggro or wondering if we should aggro it, the action finally happened. We jumped in, the enemy warped in with a few more ships than had been scouted to help the dying Drake and the battle intensified. But just as the Drake's armor was crumpling and we were getting ready to call secondary targets, it lit up a cyno and a Chimera materialized in our midst. Just as the Drake died we called a GTFO as we were now outnumbered close to 2-to-1, and had a carrier against us. We lost the Maelstrom to this because he couldn't escape fast enough.

But the action didn't stop there as some of my blues' buddies had war targets in the area, one of which was in a Raven coming from the Low-sec system we were just in (I don't remember if it's the same Raven as the one in the gang... it's been 2 days!). Only two guys in our fleet can engage this guy in Hi-sec: the Drake and the Dominix. The only thing I could do to help was to bump the hell out of it. Sitting at 0m of the gate I turned on the MWD in anticipation of the ship's uncloaking, and when it did it got tackled by the Drake/Domi duo, and I took off NHRA-fashion and gave him the hardest bump I could, and repeated the maneuver 3 or 4 times; there was no way he was going to re-approach this gate! In typical Caldari style, once the shields were gone the armor and hull was like papier mâché and the Raven winked out of existence. I couldn't be on the killmail, but at least I helped. A lot of my buddies are UK based and it was getting late for them so we disbanded and all headed our separate ways.

So all in all that was a good break from the quietness. I need to do this once in a while because my corp now has only a small amount of active pilots, and in the alliance a lot of people are spread out over a few W-space colonies and people are more into building stuff than destroying stuff. But a little op like this one is good at helping me focus on what I really love about this game. In my corp hunt I think I can scratch Low-sec piracy; I really can't be arsed to ransom people... I only want to blow 'em to bits! But I also want to keep my freedom to move around. Yesterday I was flying around in my PvP Sleipnir and came really close to catching a red shuttle in Hi-sec; I was just one sensor booster short. As you can imagine, I wouldn't want that to happen to me! So yeah, it's looking a lot like I'll be heading to 0.0 in the near future, but there is some fun to be had in empire where war targets can be caught pants down. Like I said in the opening paragraph, I need to have a few discussions in order to find the corp that has the most of what I love to do and still gives me the freedom to do my own little thing. But at least things are looking more fun than they used to.